Governor called lawmaker who was "no" vote on union-backed bill

A Webster City Democrat whose "no" vote helped defeat a union-backed bill says he has no intention of switching parties.

In 2007, an eastern Iowa Democrat switched to the Republican Party after being pressured to vote for a bill that would have forced non-union workers to pay a fee if they receive union services on the job. Representative McKinley Bailey, a Democrat from Webster City, says he got plenty of phoned-in pressure from outside his district over the weekend on the bill to set a "prevailing wage" for taxpayer-funded construction projects.

"I have received about 500-plus messages between my cell phone, my house phone and my legislative voice mail, so there’s no way I would have been able to get through all of them," Bailey says.

Bailey told Webster City voters over the weekend that only a couple of the messages urging him to vote for the bill came from voters in his district. However, one message came from Governor Chet Culver, a fellow Democrat who was urging Bailey to vote for the bill. "I didn’t listen to it until pretty late on Sunday night and (Culver) was nice and very cordial and asked me to consider changing my vote and to give him a phone call," Bailey says. "But it was so late when I listened to it that I didn’t."

While Bailey says he has no intention of switching parties, Bailey did not attend the private meeting House Democrats had on Monday afternoon.